Rights Leader Rustin, 75, Dies : Pacifist Helped to Set Up King’s March on Capital

Bayard Rustin, a lifelong civil rights leader who helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, died early Monday at Lenox Hill Hospital of cardiac arrest. He was 75 and had undergone surgery for a perforated appendix.

Rustin’s lengthy career as a civil rights activist, during which he was arrested many times for challenging segregationists and was chastised by radical blacks for counseling against violence, began in the 1940s.

He was field secretary and race relations secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation and he helped to develop the Congress of Racial Equality. In the 1950s he was special adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and chief architect of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

It was Rustin to whom King turned to plan the 1963 March on Washington that attracted 200,000 people and featured King’s famous “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

As a pacifist, Rustin served time in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II. He was the executive secretary of the War Resisters League from 1953 to 1964 and helped to organize the first ban-the-bomb march in England in 1959.

Born one of 12 children on March 17, 1912, Rustin was reared in West Chester, Pa.

“I was illegitimate . . . and I was brought up by my grandparents,” he told the Saturday Evening Post in July, 1964. “My grandfather was a caterer and extremely poor, but there was always enough to eat because of leftovers from the banquets. Sometimes there would be no real food in the house, but there was plenty of pate de foie gras and Roquefort cheese.”

Rustin learned his pacifism from his grandmother. As a member of the Society of Friends, she reared him to be a Quaker. After serving two years in prison for his refusal to serve in the military, Rustin became chairman of the Free India Committee and in 1948 spent six months in that country studying Mohandas K. Gandhi’s independence movement. His experience with Gandhi confirmed his own belief that nonviolence was the only way to effect major change.

That position brought him criticism from his own people.

“I’m prepared to be a (Uncle) Tom if it’s the only way I can save women and children from being shot down in the street,” he said when he was taunted for walking the streets of Harlem to help cool the riots of 1964.

In 1969, he called black college students’ demands for black studies programs stupid and accused educators who acceded of taking “an easy way out.”

The histories of minorities were part of American history and that was how they should be taught, he argued.

Rustin’s stances were often based on painful personal experiences.

On one occasion, when traveling in Pennsylvania as a member of his high school state championship football team, he was refused service in a restaurant.

“I sat there quite a while and was eventually thrown out bodily,” he told the New York Times in 1964. “From that point on, I took the conviction that I would not accept segregation.”

Sang in Nightclubs

Rustin came to New York in 1938 and enrolled at the City College of New York. He earned his living by singing in nightclubs with folk singers Josh White and Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly).

In 1941, Rustin joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a nondenominational religious organization dedicated to nonviolence. He served the organization for 12 years, and later organized the New York branch of the Congress of Racial Equality.

To test a court ruling against discrimination in interstate travel in 1947, Rustin helped to organize the first “freedom ride” into the South. Arrested in North Carolina, he served 22 days on a chain gang. His account of the experience in the Baltimore Afro-American in 1949 initiated an investigation that resulted in the abolition of chain gangs.

In 1964, Rustin became the executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute in New York. It was founded to act as a service center and clearinghouse for civil rights groups and has served ever since as a bridge between the labor movement and the black community.

Continued Commitment

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he continued his commitment to human rights, working for Cambodian refugees in Thailand, observing elections in Zimbabwe and El Salvador and establishing a liaison organization in the United States with grass-roots groups working for peaceful change in South Africa.

A staunch supporter of Israel, Rustin founded the Organization for Black Americans to Support Israel in 1975 and worked for the freedom of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews.

He is survived by three sisters and an aunt. There will be a private funeral service Thursday in New York.